Next sunset
Remember after this song to seed the next shadowland of loss, following the fever of fences we built to keep us in, and terrors out, when in the shade of their heights they only heightened fears, when in the privacy of night, we meant to leap between those stars, counting.
Beyond ends
So much remains after fear and desire.
I am astonished by the last things to run
from the hearts of the living, into death
and by the running river of their return.
And stay
Unless you pushed us
from that amniotic round
of insular growth,
we could not live––
to unknow
its whispered secret,
to seek it out among
the throbbing body
of the rest of us.
Forms and function
An enfolded order has a way of highlighting the persistent presence of what many call a mess, a catch-all term to highlight the collective creation of living beings who will not submit to confinement or easy reduction.
Nonlocal connections
Things were connected. That much we could tell. We squinted at the things. Later, we thought about the space between them: that connective tissue we called nothing then, all now.
Of interconnected worlds
At the last quake, these particles waved away all pretext of certainty and became again shrouded in mystery. In the final seconds before the ground shook beneath us, we had been admiring the precise clarity of our charts––and by extension, ourselves. An hour later, we looked back at those versions of ourselves as quaint and long ago, when these constant waves were given specks, neat and known.
Masked
That starry filament
the membrane of something
& no telling what.
To the matter of mind
To a mind willing to wait beneath the matter of a living form, who pads her soft solidity at midnight to rest her weight on the chest, these doves will visit sometimes, to coo an edge bathed in moonlight back from the blade of itself.
Wanting to breathe
When asked, it is air we want. Birdsong too, but to admit the latter feels like pushing it so let’s start with breath. When not asked, we raise hands to sky. From the bay windows high above us, members of the homeowners association shake their heads. Our pause confirms what someone was just saying about our idle ways. What on earth are we doing if not climbing? We are even slow in our greetings––total inefficiency! This bracing way of clasping both arms at once as though holding against a tipping ship, holding the gaze for balance as we ask, How are you? And in wonder, it is so good to see you here even if we both know the birds are leaving and here hasn’t been so hot for some time. Perhaps especially because we know this, there is wonder. Here we are!
You! We say, and You! We respond even as each also knows how the overlords are doing something with the air––they learn to parcel this in packaged plans through air-conditioned boards. Yes, they will divide this, too. No, they will not take us while we are still so efficiently removed from our next breaths instead and they call our deaths collateral, shaking heads at our parents and the wayward ways that led to our lazy arms reaching above our dazed faces into the not-yet sun we have the gall to dare to know us well enough to draw from memory our shadows beside where we stand and it will not stay––
but for a moment we are painted silhouettes, mighty against the next hill where we stand with our backs in indolent refusal of the million-dollar views, faces aimed again to the next morning as we mourn the way of knowing that comes with knowing we will never be ready but still, missing birdsong, dare to breathe, believing the next day will come
And skeletal remains
Considering the stars that are absent in daytime
it is not so strange to find unknown bodies who
unbidden but abiding, come––and the question
of avian flight, its beginnings: from tree-limbs
down or from ground up? The climbers between
branches or the crawlers into them when the front
pair of four limbs become propellers, then wings.
One of the dancers compared her stirring limbs
to the scream against the skeleton that might
become in confinement a gnarled tree. Only
the bird displays a wishbone, that peaking bow
to scissor stratospheric weave and from her history
this question about what is possible before
there are harbors for safe landing of a body
with a head full of sky
